I've recently developed a bidirectional forum-mailing list bridge because I could no longer wait for a Mail2Forum release compatible with phpBB3. My bridge is already in use at vassalengine.org, so has had some real-world testing. I'd be happy to have help from anybody who is interested in doing further development.

Last edited by uckelman on Thu Jul 29, 2010 2:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I've had a bit of time now to write up some instructions, which I've put in INSTALL. Everything is very much tailored for my particular site right now; you might find that things which work for me don't at all work for you. I'd like to have some help ironing those things out.

I am very, very excited about this, as I've been beating my head against the wall fiddling with m2f.

I'm going to check it out now, so I'll probably be in touch with questions (or hopefully comments and additions).

I'm glad to hear somebody else is interested. I look forward to hearing about your experience with it.

I know from use on my own forum that there are a few areas which could be improved, namely:

* There's some non-BBCode markup which still makes it out to the list. I've been collecting messages which contain examples of this, with an eye to fixing them sometime soon.

* Subjects could be handled better. Right now, we get a pileup of tags indicating forum and list names. These should be trimmed, but how to do it so that text which is identical to a tag, but actually a bona fide part of the subject, remains untouched is not obvious to me right now. (You can see examples of this in any thread at my forum which has more than a few posts.)

* There's an encoding problem where some incoming emails end up with strange characters in them on the forum. Right now, on my forum, they all seem to come from one person, and every message from that person is this way. That should make it easier to determine what the problem is.

I would love to have some help sorting out these issues, as this is really a secondary project for me. (The project which uses my list-forum bridge is the one which takes up most of my development time.)

uckelman wrote:
* There's an encoding problem where some incoming emails end up with strange characters in them on the forum. Right now, on my forum, they all seem to come from one person, and every message from that person is this way. That should make it easier to determine what the problem is.

I switched from using Mail_mimeDecode to mailparse for handling incoming mail, which I believe got me a solution to this problem for free. (The motivating factor was that Mail_mimeDecode fails to extract any content from parts of type multipart/alternative, which is a huge problem.)

So, if you're trying out the mail bridge, update to what's in the repository now.